


Et in Arcadia Ego

by appleapple



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Canon Compliant, First Time, M/M, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-03
Updated: 2017-06-03
Packaged: 2018-11-08 09:17:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11078589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/appleapple/pseuds/appleapple
Summary: Plague had taken Mitras that summer.





	Et in Arcadia Ego

**Author's Note:**

> Dedicated to dear sugarplumsenpai, without whose recent works this surely would have been much longer, and without whose kindness it would not have been written at all ;)))
> 
> You inspired me to try a shorter piece my friend...but don't get used to it :P

The first time…

No. Further back than that.

Plague had taken Mitras that summer. It had started--near as they could tell--with a few isolated cases of fever in the slums. That wasn’t uncommon enough to warrant any special attention; even in Historia’s enlightened reign poverty was an intractable reality.

By the time anyone had realized this was no ordinary sickness it was June, and carts of rotting, stinking corpses were being driven through the streets. The plague had spread far beyond the slums. There was not a house untouched by illness. People had begun fleeing the city in a panic, and Historia--secluded in the palace, against her will--had issued a quarantine, which the military had been called in to enforce.

Of all the loathsome jobs Eren had been called upon to perform, turning back families with children...being spit on by terrified civilians, who believed that he was condemning them to death…

Every night at the end of his shift he came home to the barracks and scrubbed himself raw, head to toe. The carts pulling the bodies through the streets, stacked up like cordwood...He tried not to look. Tried not to think about it. Tried not to remember. One bad day he couldn’t shake the images at all; two feet--too small to belong to even the smallest adult--sticking out from under a stained sheet. Bare. Dirty. 

Someone had loved those feet. He was certain of it. Some parent--some mother, some father--had kissed them, tickled them, marvelled at them. Helped them learn to walk, to run. 

They were taking the bodies to be burned, because there were too many now to bury.

He stayed in the bath a long time that night; long after the water had turned cold.

A week into the city’s quarantine--longest and most wretched week of his life--it was mid-June, hot, and the city stank sickly-sweet of death. They sprayed perfume on handkerchiefs and tied them over their faces, for all the good it did them. Standing at his post at the city gates, watching flies gather over one of the carts with an idle weariness. Would they burn the carts when it was over, he wondered? Or would they be returned to service hauling onions and potatoes and hay and lumber, these chariots of death?

Someone told him Levi had it.

He couldn’t remember who, afterward; not Armin or Mikasa, anyway. He couldn’t remember leaving his post or walking to the barracks through the hot dusty streets, though he must have.

Levi was in his room. Their numbers were not so great that they filled even half the rooms they once had, and only a few Scouts had been ill so far. They were all in the infirmary. No one had dared take Levi there.

He opened his eyes when Eren came in. His face was drawn and pale and he said nothing, only watched with gray eyes oddly wan and listless. Eren poured cold water onto a cloth and laid it on his forehead.

They did not speak. Not then, or later.

Eren did not return to guard duty, that day or the next. He didn’t report his absence or request leave, but perhaps Hanji knew because no one came looking.

After a few days a thought was coming close to the edge of Eren’s consciousness; he tried to swat it away, superstitiously avoiding it. The fever was not wasting Levi the way he had seen it do to some others; perhaps he was too much a part of life for that. There had been something divine and not-quite-human about him for as long as Eren had known him.

But what was becoming clear...

Eren had been spending the days fetching water and clean linen to Levi’s room; laying cool cloths on his forehead and trying to get him to eat without success. It had been most of a week. It had been most of a week, and he was still here. 

_Levi was not going to be one of the unfortunate third the disease killed._ That was not a thought he wanted to have, because it seemed like tempting fate; to believe would be to have it taken away, to return to Levi’s room from running some errand to find him….

Gone.

It had grown difficult for Eren to swallow, to speak, to breathe; to do all those things he had taken for granted.

He had taken Levi for granted. In a swimming shoal of fish, always dispersing and disappearing, replaced with new fish too quick sometimes for the eye to follow--Levi was constant, the shadow, the shark. Eren had thought he was somehow immune to death.

Levi lived through a fifth day, and he began to recover. His eyes were clear and he asked after Hanji on that morning, and Eren had to scramble to bring him tea, motions awkward and clumsy as though he had forgotten everything he had ever learned.

He felt as if his body were too small, as if it could no longer contain him. His heart beat against the rattle-pate of his ribcage. He paced to the window to the door and back again while Levi drank his tea and complained about something; never before had he paid so little attention to his mentor, or so much.

“What’s the matter with you?” Levi was asking him. Frowning at him. A deep crease in his forehead, gray eyes beneath.

The room was too small, his body was too small; Levi was larger than life. 

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“I hope you didn’t catch it from me,” Levi said, and he was close enough _(the room was too small!)_ that he need only reach out a hand to rest it across Eren’s forehead.

Which he did.

Levi’s hand was wonderfully cool against his skin. His heart rattled.

“You’re warm.”

“I’m always warm,” Eren muttered, wanting to pull away.

What made him do it? Some implacable deathwish? He ducked his head so that Levi’s hand was in his hair; and that brought him close enough.

His mouth on Levi’s was warm also.

Levi tasted like mint and tea and Eren could see himself, suddenly, doing things with him: all sorts of things. Forbidden things. All the things he hadn’t been allowed to think about.

He parted his lips and--cautiously--Levi did the same. Ideas were unfolding themselves like a map in his mind, and he was disappointed--startled--when Levi pulled away.

 _The eyes are the window to the soul._ Had he read that somewhere? Had Armin read it to him? Whoever had said that hadn’t known Levi; his eyes were no window, they were a shield against the world. Gray and fathomless, unknowable. Eren had seen the ocean; childhood dream fulfilled, and he had seen the ocean look like that on a cold and overcast day. The green waves turned with a magician’s trick to gray.

“Sorry,” he muttered, inadequately, when the silence had stretched on too long.

Levi looked annoyed. “What are you doing now?”

“What? I don’t know…”

“You never do, do you?” A kind of weary resignation.

 _Leap, and the net will catch you,_ Eren thought wildly; had Armin told him that too? It didn’t seem like something Armin would say.

He leaned forward again, because there was something in what Levi had said. Something in what he _hadn’t_ said. A long kiss, a longer kiss; running his tongue along the inside of Levi’s bottom lip.

Again, Levi pushed him back. 

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry,” he said breathlessly. Repeating himself. “Should I stop?” With sudden impulsiveness. Challenge instead of demur. The gauntlet laid carefully at Levi’s feet.

Levi narrowed his eyes. This time Eren took his hands; he’d had so few opportunities to do that in the years he’d known him. The weight of Levi’s hands; cool touch of skin, the gathered strength of him. It made him tremble. Levi’s soul might have lived in his hands, those powerful and deadly unassuming hands; smaller than Eren’s own.

“I love you,” he blurted out, his mouth doing things (again) he hadn’t told it to; “I thought, maybe, you were going to die. But you didn’t.” Only belatedly did he realize he was answering Levi’s question. He hadn’t let go of Levi this time; Levi hadn’t pushed him away.

“No,” Levi agreed, after a moment. “Not this time.” He said it thoughtfully, as though Eren had made a point he hadn’t considered before. 

Eren sat on Levi’s bed, holding Levi’s hands, his eyes half-closed so he wouldn’t have to look in Levi’s eyes; the room was a little cool (the window open, a blessed morning breeze wafting through before the heat of the day could overpower everything). It wasn’t a sickroom. Levi had been lucid enough last night to insist on bathing; Eren had made sure he had had clean sheets. He was hot and overwhelmed again; his chest too tight, his skin too small--while he waited (eyes closed again--coward!) for something to happen.

Levi’s hands were square and strong.

When Eren finally opened his eyes Levi was watching him. The wariness had gone. There was something different now, something Eren hadn’t seen before. 

Amusement.

“I love you.”

“You said that.”

There were other times. Better times, and worse times to come: but this was the first time. Out of death’s grasp, but not out of death’s shadow (never quite that) and Eren traced Levi’s collarbone with his finger. Something he had wanted to do many times. Daydreamed about, back in his teenage years, when he should have been doing chores.

Levi hadn’t said yes and he hadn’t said no; he hadn’t really said anything.

 _“Can_ I kiss you again?”

Levi inclined his head. Eren leaned forward.

The sweetness of summer, of death pushed back. The promise of tomorrow but not quite all the tomorrows after that. Eren pulled his white linen shirt over his head, slowly, and Levi’s hands found their way to his waist, tracing his ribs.

He had never been so aware of his own body. Every part of him filled with a strange crackling energy. He pressed himself close to Levi, feeling him, the steady thrum of his heart stark contrast to Eren’s own. They lay together, bodies pressed together--closer than they had ever been. And Eren shook and shivered but Levi was a steady, solid weight against him. Even when all their clothes were gone--haphazardly strewn over bed and floor--a sight likely never before seen in Levi’s room--Levi was steady.

“I love you,” Eren said again, to the hollow of Levi’s throat, unable to stop it. Between kisses, as they touched each other. Levi’s hands were warm now.

“Yeah. I love you back,” Levi said, so tremendously, casually, matter-of-fact that Eren grinned and held him tight.

The first time. He couldn’t ever think of it later without grinning, remembering his own part with probably more credit than he deserved. Although it was another week before the plague really waned--before the new cases declined and at last ceased, and the quarantine finally, blessedly lifted. He remembered going to Levi’s bed as the bookend to that awful time. Coming back at night after they had both returned to active duty, finding joy in each other in the midst of tragedy and pain. 

In an odd way it was the template for their lives together. Perhaps because suffering had already taken so much it couldn’t take this; even in the heat of battle, even in the wake of death, even in the strain of sorrow they could turn to each other and find comfort. Long after Levi’s body had become familiar to him it brought him joy; every time was still that first time, touched with the same sudden unexpected sweetness. Light and heat and all his love pushing back death for one more day.

But all of that was still to come, stretched out ahead of him--now there was only the feel of Levi’s body against his, the scent of his sweat-damp skin as the room grew warm. Now there was the sweetness of his mouth, now there were all the delights denied, postponed, withheld--presented at once in glorious overflowing summer bounty.

And afterwards he lay with his head--his sweaty head--in the crook of Levi’s sweaty elbow. It was too hot; they would have to move--to get up--to bathe--to dress--to report to Hanji, to return to duty, probably. But for now there was this, them, together; freedom in a moment out of time.

The first time.

**Author's Note:**

> The working title of this little story was 'Plague' but when I finished it seemed inadequate and not true to purpose.
> 
> The meaning of 'Et in Arcadia ego' (a famous phrase & painting I have shamelessly co-opted for woefully deficient reasons ;) do look it up) is 'even in Arcadia [paradise] there am I [death]' Even in an idyllic land death is waiting; and I thought: what about the reverse?
> 
> That is SnK to me, but especially this pairing; finding a kernel of hope and joy in a world of despair and death, and having that be the greatest truth.


End file.
